I think it mostly explained by that in earlier days most people who dived into programming did it because it interested them. Then it became one of most lucrative career path, and naturally it saw surge of people, who do not share same interests. Relative amount of people invested in dive bombing into meaty details dropped, but it quite possible that absolute amount have not declined by much.

While GM decides what monsters to throw into players, they still need to know what they could use without it being either underwhelming or overwhelming. You dismiss this simply by saying: “just be a good DM”.

• New DM’s will want guidelines to start from.
• If combat is important having written rules help to use consistent ruling on same situation in different instances.
• Story focused DM might reduce amount of effort needed to plan combat, since there is no need to build it from scratch.

Disadvantage of having to look up rules then you don’t remember them could be mitigated by just saying: Look guys, I don’t remember ruling now, so not to break the flow, I will rule it this way, and look it up later.

So while for most players rule heavy systems are less accessible, they are actually more accessible for many DMs, and since mastering have much higher barrier of entry, such systems at least should not be dismissed outright.

Sekiro is the closest reference I know, but it is still quite different. Sekiro most important part is bosses, and I doubt En Garde will provide same variety (And if it against all odds proves me wrong it probably gonna become my new fav game). On the other hand En Garde focuses more on combat with regular enemies, and IMO does it better then other games with similar gameplay.